by M. O. Grenby
The main narrative of Hughes’ novel clearly is a ‘little world’ narrative, an account of Tom’s progress from what Arnold called the ‘natural imperfect state of boyhood’ towards the state of being a ‘brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, . . . gentleman, and . . . Christian’, the goal Tom’s father had identified for his son’s schooling.11 Like Fielding’s The Governess, then, Hughes’ novel shows its links to allegory. Indeed, Tom himself is often read by critics as the contested middle ground in the moral struggle of the story, with the pious Arthur the representative of his better, spiritual nature and the bully Flashman the representative of his lower, material nature (fig. 13). More complicatedly allegorical is the way in which the text repeatedly reads Tom’s moral struggle as an analogue of struggles in the wider world of nation and empire, reversing the conventional movement of allegory from the literal and historical instance to the moral and spiritual meaning. Here, the moral struggle leads to a clearer sense of the ‘higher’ historical and political meanings, a movement assumed, for example, in the narrator’s commentary about the meaning of fights:
After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself or spiritual wickednesses in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.12
Public schools functioned, proudly and explicitly, as ‘the chief nurseries’ for the empire in the nineteenth century.13 Hughes’ novel was, and continues to be, understood to show schoolboys the values, attitudes and strength of character needed by the future leaders of what was at the time the world’s most powerful nation. Not surprisingly, then, Tom Brown’s Schooldays ends with a series of references to imperial concerns: as Tom searches for direction on what his ‘work in the world’ might be, he notes that East, his first friend at school, has already joined a regiment in India; and the unnamed ‘young Master’ with whom Tom has his final conversation at Rugby apparently refers to the Indian ‘Mutiny’ breaking out at the time of the novel’s publication, when he muses that the school seems to be ‘the only little corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly, wisely, and strongly ruled just now’.14
Figure 13. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. London: Macmillan, 1867, facing p. 255. ‘Tom’s first defence of Arthur’.
In its strong and explicit linkage between the text and its historical situation, Hughes’ novel exhibits the quality of ‘worldliness’ Edward Said attributes to texts in which ‘the circumstantiality’ and ‘historical contingency’ of the writing are ‘incorporated in the text, an infrangible part of its capacity for conveying and producing meaning’. Such texts, Said suggests, place restraints upon interpreter and interpretation, because their interpretation – ‘by virtue of the exactness of their situation in the world – has already commenced’.15 Tom Brown’s Schooldays was an important source for character types, plot incidents and motifs for school stories for at least a century following its publication and, arguably, left an indelible mark on the generic form itself. One might speculate, then, that the capacity of school stories in general for ‘conveying and producing meaning’ is tied to ideologies of the nation. Indeed, many important school stories are set against the backdrop of wars, which are often occasions for the blatant performance of national identities and sometimes occasions for searching inquiries into such ideological formations. A Separate Peace (1959) by American writer John Knowles, for example, is set in a New England boarding school during the school year of 1942–3, shortly after the belated entry of the United States into the Second World War, and is a meditation on the promises made to boys about the meanings of manhood in times of military conflict and the ways in which such meanings are betrayed. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), a school story turned inside-out, with a school of boys marooned on an island after their aeroplane is shot down during an unnamed war, the boys unlearning (or, possibly, revealing the deep structure of) the practices of civilisation, demands to be read in the context of Cold War tensions. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974), with its bleak indictment of school life as a thin layer of virtue concealing the violence by which the consent of the governed is secured, was published in the United States as the decades-long Vietnam War was coming to its inglorious end. Even Charles Hamilton’s Greyfriars stories, published under the pseudonym of ‘Frank Richards’ in various forms between 1908 and 1965, might profitably be read against the backdrop of the slow decline of the British empire from the Boer War (1899–1902) to the Suez Canal crisis (1956), and the reassessments of the national self-image entailed by such a declension. Undisciplined, untruthful, conniving and obtuse as he is, the eponymous hero of Billy Bunter of Greyfriars (1947) nevertheless can summon a bit of ‘genuine old British pluck’ to save the day when he needs to do so.16
The precursor to all of these ironic, knowing revisions of the school story is undoubtedly Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899), a series of stories loosely based on Kipling’s own schooldays at United Services College, a boarding school established by ex-Army officers for boys destined for military training. When the book was first published, one reviewer declared that Kipling’s great achievement was to write from inside the point of view of the boy, ‘unscrupulously glorifying the boy’s ideals’.17 It is true that the narrative voice of the experienced guide is largely absent from the stories, which are full of detailed accounts of Stalky, Beetle and M’Turk’s exuberant escapades out of bounds and transcriptions of their slangy conversations. Even their punishments, when they come, are bracing rather than subduing to the trio; for Kipling’s boys know that there are two sets of incompatible attributes required of successful administrators and soldiers of the British empire – virtue and violence, obedience and defiance, discipline and transgression – and that they are expected to learn both of them. The Head of the school several times signals his appreciation of the ingenuity and dexterity with which the little band of boys outwits the lower masters and the neighbouring farmers, but he never says anything that could be so construed. Indeed, the terms of this code are clear: you can break the rules, but you must not be caught; you can know, but you must not tell. The final chapter, in which the ‘boys’, now grown men, gleefully recount Stalky’s exploits in India, documents just how effectively the double imperative produces military men who thrive in the service of their country.
After Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the main tradition of boys’ school stories clearly functioned to create the gendered masculine subject, a subject closely connected to national and imperial imaginaries. It is entirely predictable, then, that girls’ school stories of the period are significantly different in their plots and styles, since what was wanted of girls was quite different from what was wanted of boys. The female subject, however, was also an imperial subject. In her school story, A Little Princess (1905), Frances Hodgson Burnett directly addressed the question of what an empire girl should be. The short story on which A Little Princess was based, Sara Crewe; or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s (1887), suggests two different imperial events as contexts for Sara’s experiences: the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 during which Ram Dass, the Indian servant of Sara’s neighbour, has saved the life of his master, Mr Carrisford, and the discovery and exploitation, beginning in 1867, of the rich deposits of diamonds and gold in South Africa, an adventure given in Burnett’s novel to Ralph Crewe and his school friend Carrisford. However confused the history, the point of the references is clear. Both Crewe and Carrisford are damaged by their participation in overseas adventures, Crewe dying of ‘jungle fever’ and Carrisford ill and despondent after the untimely death of his friend. Sara’s role as a daughter of the empire is to transform the brutal and brutalised male friend of her father into a healthy a
nd benevolent surrogate father. Sara succeeds in fixing her ‘Indian gentleman’ through her remarkable ability to tell stories; in particular, to construct the narrative of a family in which he wishes to participate. In Burnett’s novel, then, the happy ending of the school story is the retreat of the girl from school – a school that is run by a hard and mean mistress – into a family home. Mary Molesworth’s The Carved Lions (1895) similarly details Geraldine Le Marchant’s attempts to find a way to return to the enclosure of home rather than bear her unhappy existence at school. Like Sara Crewe, Geraldine is an orphan of empire, her father being given the opportunity to recoup his financial losses by taking a post in South America. Unlike Sara, Geraldine initially looks forward to school, but finds that the structure of school life allows her neither physical or intellectual privacy nor emotional intimacy with the headmistress. The happy ending of her story comes after she runs away from school, when she is adopted by an elderly couple to await her parents’ return to London.
Fielding had ended The Governess with Jenny Peace leaving Mrs Teachum’s school, having received a letter from her aunt summoning her home; Wollstonecraft had ended hers with Caroline and Mary’s father removing them from the tutelage of Mrs Mason; Burnett and Molesworth end theirs with Sara and Geraldine recreating homes they have lost. In Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did at School (1873), Katy attends school only briefly, knowing from the beginning of her year away that her widowed father cannot spare her from her home duties for long. Anne, in L. M. Montgomery’s series of six novels about her, spends four years, but only one novel, away from home attending college in Anne of the Island (1915). In the final scene of the novel, Anne finally accepts Gilbert Blythe’s proposal of marriage and looks forward to the home they will build together. The most valued girls’ school stories in the English-language tradition across several centuries, it seems, are those that firmly bracket school life with domestic spaces towards which the girls inevitably move.
But, if such a summary accurately encapsulates the canon, it accounts for only a small fraction of the girls’ school stories produced between the 1880s and the 1950s. This other tradition might be said to have begun in earnest with L. T. Meade’s publication in 1886 of A World of Girls, which Meade wrote after reading Talbot Baines Reed’s The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s (serialised in The Boy’s Own Paper, 1881–2). Meade eventually wrote some forty school stories, the last six published after her death in 1914. While each story was set in a new school and had a different cast of characters, they can be grouped into four general types: boarding-school stories, private-school stories, day-school stories and college stories. The stories set in boarding schools and colleges, in particular, demonstrate Meade’s interest in the new, intellectual education for girls and women being theorised by first-wave feminists and put in place by such reforming headmistresses as Dorothea Beale and the principals of the new women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. The headmistresses of Meade’s fictional establishments can be identified as members of the new generation of educationalists by their allowance for privacy in the arrangements of girls’ bedrooms and studies, by their attitudes to the need for systematic training and by their establishment of behavioural codes focusing on ideals of honour and the good of the group.
The plots of Meade’s boarding-school stories all describe a similar trajectory. An adolescent girl is sent to school when her family home is disrupted. Her arrival at the beginning of the story causes a disturbance of established routines and loyalties within the school body. She soon finds herself in an untenable situation, her better self prompting her to declare allegiance to one girl or group of girls while she is simultaneously under the secret influence of another more dangerous girl or group. The resolution of the conflict always involves public disclosure of what she has borne in silence for much of the story and, finally, her full integration into the school. Unlike more canonical girls’ school stories, L. T. Meade’s boarding-school stories do not end with girls leaving school. Indeed, the only girls who return home are the girls banished from the school community in disgrace. The ending of Meade’s first school story, A World of Girls, is typical in this respect. Annie Forest, who has been wrongly accused of the vandalism that is bedevilling the school, finds and returns the abducted little girl Nan to school. A complicated story of honour and dishonourable conduct among the girls unravels in the final chapters of the novel, as various members of the school community freely tell the secrets they know. Susan Drummond, the miscreant who only admits to her transgressions when she is directly questioned, is removed from the school at night, a scene not shown in the narrative. The final chapter does not turn towards the outer world and replace the girls in domestic spaces, but turns back to the text itself. In the last episode, an account of a prize-giving ceremony, Meade introduces a group of characters she identifies only as ‘companions’ of Annie Forest. Acting as empty characters, a blank space into which readers may project themselves, this group of unnamed girls asks Annie to ‘tell us’ about her award-winning essay. The story ends here, with Meade in this gesture attempting to include both the girls inside the text and the girl readers outside the text in her celebration of the world of girls.
A residue of allegory is evident in Meade’s stories. But, rather than being ‘little world’ stories, they are examples of narratives of ‘worlds apart’. The larger world does figure in the stories, but only as an intrusion. In the subplots of her novels, girls are abducted, assaulted and robbed of their purses by rough and dirty men. In representing the dangers of the wider world for girls in these symbolic scenes, Meade alludes to contemporary panics about how young women taking up the paid employment for which their education was preparing them and entering public space unescorted can be distinguished from prostitutes or working-class women. Meade’s use of the ‘world apart’ narrative structure, then, does not suggest her ignorance of, or her dissociation from, the determinate conditions of her time and place. Indeed, the tensions enacted in Meade’s school stories – between the patriarchal home and the world of girls, between the exhilaration of leaving home and the fear of the world – were central contradictions in the ideological formation of femininity in late-Victorian England. Meade does not propose a narrative solution to these contradictions. The only answer she gives is to hold open the imaginative space she has created for her readers in the stories by refusing to return her scholars to an outside world.
Like Fielding and Wollstonecraft, Meade is preoccupied with telling, reading, writing, interpretation – with textuality itself – as the enabling condition of a female community apart from the wider world. Evelyn Sharp, who was an avid reader of the girls’ magazine Atalanta at the end of the nineteenth century when Meade edited it, challenges the celebration of such worlds of girls in her school story, The Making of a Schoolgirl (1897), but does so exactly by foregrounding questions of reading, writing and interpretation. Sharp’s main character, Becky, has woven her expectations and hopes about school from her reading of girls’ school stories. She believes, for example, that she can expect to suffer before she is fully accepted into the school, that the headmistress will dislike her very much at first, and that there will be one teacher who will take her part. As it turns out, school is not very much like this. But elsewhere in Sharp’s novel misreadings reveal rather than obscure meanings. When the girls stage Lord Tennyson’s narrative poem Enoch Arden, for example, they read selectively, leaving out ‘all the meaning . . . and all the long words, and the stuffiness, and all that’ and playing only the ‘lively’ and ‘jolly’ parts of the domestic drama; the resulting spectacle clearly shows marriage to be a proprietary contest between men for the ownership of a woman, an interpretation that is hidden by the sentiment and mystifications of Tennyson’s language.18
Sharp, unlike Meade, locates the world of girls within the wider world of which it is a part. A significant part of the novel is taken up with the exchange of letters between Becky and her brother and playmate, Jack. Part of Becky’s task i
s to learn to read the world of the school in light of her own experiences of it, despite her brother’s constant denigration of all things female. By the end of the novel, when Jack and Becky re-unite at home for a school holiday, Becky is well on her way to recognising the limitations of his descriptions and judgments.
The girls’ school story flourished between the late nineteenth and the mid twentieth century. Most authors followed Meade’s solution of establishing female communities as worlds apart. Some, like Elinor Brent-Dyer in the Chalet School series, set their schools in remote locations, so that the school world literally is separated from its context by language and custom. Writers like Angela Brazil documented the minutiae of school life and shut out the claims of the larger world, as suggested by the common motif in Brazil’s stories of letters forgotten in coat pockets or lost before being opened. For many of the popular writers, the series form allowed the creation and maintenance of complete world systems that existed only textually. There are seven books in Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s popular Dimsie series, for example, and fifty-nine books in Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series. Elsie Oxenham not only published thirty-seven books in her Abbey series, but also had characters from various of her series meet and make connections with one another. The sheer volume of reading, to say nothing of the complicated storylines of such series, required engaged and committed readers. Indeed, fan clubs for some of the most popular of the writers were established, so that readers created female worlds of their own outside the texts, enabled by their common reading and interpretation of the textual worlds of girls. For many of these readers, Rosemary Auchmuty speculates, the appeal of the books is as ‘an escape for girls and women from the worst pressures of patriarchal life’, allowing them to explore ‘all-female worlds with strong role models, friendships between and among women, and a range of ways of being which went far beyond conventional prescriptions of femininity’.19 Such unofficial extensions of the narrative worlds of school stories have proliferated with the general availability of the internet, and especially following the enormous success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels (1997–2007).